Over the last two years, the consequences of 150 years of fossil-fuel development have materialized with a vengeance. The U.S. has experienced the worst drought in 80 years, replete with unprecedented Western fires and fears of widespread crop failure. This on the heels of record-breaking U.S. spring temperatures, with record daily highs outpacing record daily lows at a staggering pace of 12:1 since the start of the year. This on the heels of record U.S. flooding throughout the Mississippi basin last year. These examples reflect only the U.S. experience, in a world where record-breaking extreme weather is becoming the norm.

It’s hot. It’s going to get hotter. And despite the politics of the moment, extreme weather will eventually drive a national consensus on climate action. What can each of us do to insure we get there soon, rather than too late?

There are three answers. The first is to build political power. Elect clean-energy champions at the municipal, state, and national levels who can pass policies enabling a clean-energy revolution. The second is to stop expansion of the global carbon infrastructure. This will cut pollution — some — but will also build the morally grounded movement that must ultimately drive a strong clean-energy politics. Answer three? Grow the green shoots of the emerging sustainable economy.

Job #1: Politics

Nationally, global warming is barely getting a mention in the 2012 election. There has been some sparring over “clean-energy future” versus “Solyndra waste and fraud.” Romney has tried to beat Obama with a Keystone pipeline stick. But Obama has had little incentive to campaign hard on a green economy, while Romney wants to steer clear of his flip-flopping record on climate.

That said, this election matters, and the presidency is critical. Depending on the outcome, Clean Air Act regulation of carbon pollution will either unfold in a slow and steady manner, or it will be gutted. Critical Supreme Court appointments will shape the next 20 years of judicial decisions at they relate to action on climate. Finally, it is possible that, freed from reelection constraints, Obama may develop into the kind of visionary leader who could drive legislative gains post-2014, particularly if extreme weather continues to pound the country.

In the short term, the House is likely to retain a climate-hostile majority, so national climate-friendly and green legislation will be stalled for at least two more years. This reality only underscores the urgency of the political project. For the remainder of 2012, and starting again in January 2013, pushing for strong clean-energy majorities in state legislatures and Washington, D.C., must be job No. 1 for the climate movement. (To get involved, contact your state’s League of Conservation Voters.)

#2: Saying no, getting to yes

After the electoral smoke clears, no matter who is president, another side of the climate movement must swing into action: disciplined, large-scale opposition to new coal, oil, and gas development, including nonviolent direct action.

Facing slow-growing and even declining demand at home, U.S. oil and coal companies are seeking to ship North American oil and coal abroad, primarily to feed booming demand in Asia. Building ports and pipelines to export tar-sands oil and Powder River Basin coal only lines the pockets of these corporations. This infrastructure, over its lifetime, will lead to tens of billions more tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

At the same time, hydrofracking technology has created a rush toward gas production in the U.S. — often in highly populated areas. While natural gas has the potential to serve as a “bridge” fuel to renewables, recent research has highlighted dangers not only to local communities in terms of water supply and impacts on natural lands, but also to the global climate. Depending on the so-called “fugitive emissions” of natural gas from leaks, natural gas can be as bad as coal in terms of global-warming impacts.

The good news is that slowing gas development until technologies can be proven safe — and the leaks can be better understood, identified, and plugged — is a smart strategy for gas-rich regions. The gas is not going away. Communities that ban drilling until the risks can be effectively managed (if they can be) are simply storing away their natural wealth for a later date. And potentially they will earn more money in the process, when the value of the gas in the ground has risen.

The Keystone XL pipeline action in which more than 1,200 people were arrested at the White House could set the precedent for post-election climate activism, regardless of whether the president is Obama or Romney. If so, tens of thousands of students, citizens, retirees, and taxpayers will take their personal commitment to climate stabilization up several notches.

The personal experience of widespread civil disobedience is highly combustible fuel for a political movement. It inspires and equips the participants to become powerful moral ambassadors to their communities about the unacceptable future that we are locking in for our children, and for ourselves. These collective experiences, channeled into a winning, morally grounded politics championing a prosperous and just clean-energy economy, can be a recipe for real change in America. Serious policy change demands powerful politics, and strong politics only grows from the ground of deep moral commitment.

Saying no to new fossil-fuel development is part the battle of climate stabilization. The rest of the job is up to “change agents” in businesses and communities across the country. Ultimately, clean energy alternatives have to be scaled up and their costs driven down. This is the work of green business entrepreneurs, supported by smart policy.

#3: Grow green

From Cleveland to Portland, from Grand Rapids to New York, and in Sacramento, Kansas City, Baltimore, and dozens of other American cities and towns, there are game-changing, sustainable enterprises beginning to spread their wings. Within the confines of existing national policy, municipalities and states are creating space to incubate a new generation of business leaders.

One example, local to my region: In Troy, N.Y., two entrepreneurs have set out to eliminate Styrofoam from the face of the earth. Ecovative grows big blocks of what are essentially mushrooms and carves them up to make sculpted shipping sleeves, shipping peanuts, and even the equivalent of foam insulation wallboard. Instead of a petroleum-based product that requires intensive mining and processing to produce, and after disposal persists for tens of thousands of years, the company’s product grows at room temperature, and after it has served its purpose, it can be broken up and put into a garden as compost.

What companies like Ecovative have is a powerful vision. Through the traditional business lens, environmental and social problems appear as costs that companies are best off externalizing. In contrast, sustainable business leaders consider these as challenges to be solved, profitably, through innovation. Indeed, solving many of the world’s most pressing environmental and social problems can only be achieved if the solutions are profitable, and therefore able to rapidly achieve global scale. But business cannot solve our problems alone. Ecovative, for example, relied on critical government start-up grants to develop a competitive product.

So the third strategy leg is to grow the green economy ASAP. We all need to become green change agents—starting our own businesses or driving change internally on “green teams” within our existing workplaces.

This is an “act local, impact global” strategy. At a political level, slowly but surely the “jobs vs. the environment” story is getting beaten out by the “green economy” story. Perhaps the best political news of the last two years was the way that California voters, treated to a full-throated duel between these two narratives in the battle over Prop. 23 in 2010, endorsed a clean energy future by a 2-1 margin. This explains the desperate attack by the fossil-fuel industry on green tech.

As the real green economy grows stronger, business interests begin to align with planetary survival, making progressive energy policy easier to push through, and harder to repeal. Failure by Congress to renew the wind energy tax-credit, for example, threatens 37,000 jobs. Romney’s opposition to the credit is threatening his campaign in states like Iowa, where even Tea Party congressmen support wind development. And in states like California and Oregon, a powerful virtuous cycle is emerging: A stronger green business sector pushes for better policy, which strengthens the sustainable business sector further, empowering it to push for yet stronger policies.

Two roads

Over the next 15 years, the carbon blanket surrounding the planet is virtually certain to rise from its current value of 400 parts per million to 420 ppm. But what we achieve — as political citizens, as anti-fossil-fuel activists, and within the businesses where we work — will determine what comes after: whether we can turn the course of civilization, whether the planet will heat up 4 degrees F, or 12 degrees F, within the lifetimes of our children.

The good news is that we don’t need to lay awake at night worrying what to do with our lives. Good work, with profound consequence, is everywhere.

“A cross between paradise and paradise.” This is how Mohammed Nasheed of the Maldives describes his nation in Jon Shenk’s powerful new film, The Island President.

Shenk follows President Nasheed over a one-year period, leading up to the Copenhagen climate summit, in a beautiful, courageous, and strangely hopeful story. The film resonates all the more deeply following last month’s coup in the Maldives. The story’s ending — perhaps tragic, perhaps a powerful continuation — is today unfolding in real time.

The Maldives is a string of 2,000 islands off the coast of India, home to about 300,000 people. The highest point in the country is only a few feet above sea level. Until 2008, the islands had been under dictatorial rule for decades.

After returning home from college in Britain, in the late ’80s, Nasheed became an activist for democratic reform. He was imprisoned 12 times, and tortured, enduring 18 months of solitary confinement. In 2008, he led the nation to free and fair elections, winning the presidency.

Shenk, with unprecedented access to a head of state, films a year-long journey of this charismatic, newly elected president. With climate change a clear and present threat to the very existence of his nation, Nasheed begins speaking out globally, and passionately, for all those on the front line of climate change. Finally, he arrives in Copenhagen to play a pivotal role in crafting a global climate deal in 2009.

This is the best film dealing with global warming in years. It is a story of classical proportion: of true heroism, courage and nobility, of eloquent soliloquy, of intimate moments, and of political intrigue, compromise, and betrayal.

The film is also visually stunning. The vast blue ocean is both a serene paradise, and a powerful, threatening force, driving Nasheed’s political urgency. The Maldives capital, Malé, looks like an oasis of buildings rising out of the ocean. When asked by a reporter what was his plan B, should there be no action to slow global warming, Nasheed responds, “We will die.”

Shenk follows Nasheed in strategy sessions with his cabinet as the team seeks to leverage their moral argument as the first victims of climate change, canaries in the coal mine. Nasheed gives speeches, and makes his case with heads of states and ministers at the U.K. Parliament, at the U.N. General Assembly, in India, and finally — during the dark, crushing days of Copenhagen.

I won’t spoil the ending, though it does surprise. I will say that this is a movie for a post-Copenhagen world. Copenhagen put a brutal end to a naïve view that the leaders of the world, pushed forward by a moral imperative, would overcome petty domestic politics and sign an enforceable deal to cut global emissions by 80 percent over the next 40 years. Instead, the meeting advanced a new framework of what could be a race to the top, anchored by national commitments, and driven by domestic political organizing, in the U.S., China, India, Europe, and Brazil.

This approach will be insufficient to save the people of the Maldives. But it is a start, and we are not done yet.

Last month, just after I screened the movie, President Nasheed was forced at gunpoint to resign from his office. Political opponents seized on the economic crisis and fundamentalists objections to Nasheed’s modernizing Islam. At clear and ongoing risk to his life, Nasheed decided to remain in the country, writing, speaking, leading marches, and fighting for democracy.

And this is the enduring lesson from the movie. President Nasheed and thousands of others in the Maldives understand that their land and lives are threatened both by the rising seas, and by the corrupt politics of business as usual. They continue to fight for both democracy and climate justice, in the face of imprisonment, beating, torture, and murder.

Back here in the U.S., there is no outside force stopping any one of us from declaring our candidacy to run as a clean energy/clean money candidate, for mayor, or city council, or the state legislature or Congress. There is nothing stopping us from starting a green team in our business or workplace, and driving sustainability changes there from the ground up.

And maybe, like this island president, we don’t win the first time, and maybe our victories are followed by setbacks. Nevertheless, action at this scale, sustained, by all of us, is what must happen to change the future.

New York City, says Nasheed, is no higher than the Maldives. A cross between paradise and paradise: this is where each of us lives, and that we all must defend.

Check out the screening schedule to find out if The Island President is coming to your town soon.

]]>theislandpresident-hptheislandpresident-photo3How to beat the Tea Party and win on clean energyhttp://grist.org/politics/2011-10-11-how-to-beat-the-tea-party-and-win-on-clean-energy/
http://grist.org/politics/2011-10-11-how-to-beat-the-tea-party-and-win-on-clean-energy/#respondTue, 11 Oct 2011 18:00:25 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-10-11-how-to-beat-the-tea-party-and-win-on-clean-energy/]]>Photo: Ramkumar RajendranThe politics of the radical right have locked the U.S. into energy-policy stalemate, at least through the middle of this decade. With the climate clock running out, is this stalemate also checkmate for the planet?

Despite the ongoing tragedy in D.C., the clean energy movement has real solutions that can both revitalize the economy and stop the destruction of global climate stability. What clean energy does not have enough of — and what the Tea Party does have — are committed political candidates and its own power base in a committed business community.

National Democrats, President Obama included, talk a good game on clean energy. But beyond a handful of legislators who really get the idea (and this may yet include the president), the commitment is shallow. With Republicans scared to death to even acknowledge the science, there is no competitive pressure on the Democrats to deliver.

At the same time, the sustainability movement in business has fostered surprising leadership. Companies from IBM to GM to GE have embraced substantial internal climate initiatives. Other corporations like Nike, Clif Bar, and Starbucks actively fought the oil companies over Prop 23 in California, which would have undermined the state’s landmark climate law.

Some of this interest in clean energy and sustainability is greenwashing, both by politicians and by businesses. But the best of it reflects real leadership by real climate hawks who deeply understand the economic promise of a clean energy future.

How do we build power behind this vision?

First, politics. Somewhere in your state, there is a charismatic champion for clean energy running for local, state, or federal office in 2012 — someone who is good at politics and who will drive smart public policy. Find this person. Spend a few weekends in their dingy strip-mall office; help them raise money; make phone calls and go door to door. Get them elected. And then do the same thing the next year for a new champion. Office by office, race by race, is the only way forward.

Young people have an especially powerful role to play. The U.S. Constitution empowers citizens to become members of Congress at age 25. The founding fathers clearly believed in the wisdom of the young, a lesson we are ignoring at our peril. Today’s federal legislators are as gray as they have ever been, with senators averaging close to 60, and House members 55. Young climate hawks, if elected in numbers, could bring a game-changing dynamic to Washington. Yet few young people even imagine pursuing this opportunity.

Second, business by business, we need to grow the seeds of a clean energy economy. This means supporting green business with personal shopping dollars, but, much more critically, it means the direct work of transforming our own workplaces in the direction of sustainability. Is there a green team at your business? If so, get on it. If not, start one. Green business success is critical to lend political muscle to smart climate policy. California, again with Prop 23, has shown us how this can be done — even amidst divisive partisan squabbling and budgetary meltdowns.

Many young people understand the climate crisis and are inspired by the promise of clean energy, but they face a very sterile ground in conventional business education. As undergraduates, they are thus failing to develop the leadership skills needed to become change agents in the workplace, either launching their own green businesses or transforming conventional workplaces.

Stepping into this void, this fall the Bard Center for Environmental Policy is launching C2C Fellows, a national network for undergraduates and recent graduates aspiring to sustainability leadership in politics and business. C2C stands for Campus to Congress, to Capitol, to City Hall, and also for Campus to Corporation. C2C stands for young people gaining control of their future. By 2016, C2C Fellows will be influencing politics and business at the community, state, and national levels. C2C Fellows will be the power network for young people with the wisdom, talent, and grace to remake the world.

Stabilizing the climate is not the work of a year, of a presidential term, or of a decade. It is the 40-year work of our two generations. In 2010, the ambitious opening gambit of the U.S. clean energy movement — serious greenhouse-gas cuts beginning 2015 — was blocked by Tea Party ideologues and fossil-fuel money.

This puts us back to stalemate, not checkmate. We have five fewer years to rewire the world. Our transformative work ahead is now harder, but no less critical for the future of human civilization.

]]>http://grist.org/politics/2011-10-11-how-to-beat-the-tea-party-and-win-on-clean-energy/feed/0chess-checkmate-flickr-ramkumar-rajendran-180x150.jpgChess.Costs of inaction: the price of icehttp://grist.org/climate-change/2011-02-08-costs-of-inaction-the-price-of-ice/
http://grist.org/climate-change/2011-02-08-costs-of-inaction-the-price-of-ice/#respondWed, 09 Feb 2011 03:26:34 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-02-08-costs-of-inaction-the-price-of-ice/]]>Click for a larger version.Image: NASAArctic sea ice extent averaged over Januray 2011 its lowest recorded levels since satellite records began in 1979. It was 19,300 square miles below the record low of 5.25 million square miles, set in 2006, and 490,000 square miles below the 1979 to 2000 average.

Climate change, the crisis many hoped we could ignore for decades, is here. Ice and snow that covered the vast frozen northland for 800,000 years is disappearing rapidly. As countless square miles of the Arctic turn from reflective white to heat-absorbing dark, the result is an acceleration of global warming. And this is not just a problem for polar bears. The Arctic acts as the air conditioner for the entire planet. And it is starting to break down.

The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. As a result, every summer, more and more Arctic Sea ice is lost. As soon as the 2030’s, according to some recent estimates, the ice that until recently blanketed the summer Arctic Ocean will be completely replaced with blue-black waters. Further south, the Arctic winter is rapidly getting shorter, and white snow is being replaced by dark tundra.

In addition to this “albedo change,” there is another critical feedback from Arctic melting in the climate system. As the snow disappears, the underlying frozen tundra, or permafrost, is melting too. This is releasing carbon trapped in the soils, mostly in the form of methane gas, a powerful global warming pollutant.

The findings from our study are alarming. Compared to its pre-industrial state, every year, the melting Arctic is already heating the planet at a rate equal to 42 percent of U.S. global warming pollution — comparable to the emissions from 500 coal-fired power plants. By the end of the century, the melting Arctic may itself become a bigger source of global warming then the biggest economies in the world.

Economists have begun to calculate the costs that global warming is starting to cause — through rising sea levels, heat waves, droughts, impacts on food production — costs that will rise dramatically as the planet heats up. Warming caused today will contribute to damages for decades to come. Using government figures from the U.S. and U.K. for the costs of additional global warming, our study provides a preliminary estimate of the costs of a melting Arctic.

Costs caused by the additional warming, this year alone, are in the range of $61-$371 billion. By 2050, at the low end, we calculate the damages from the melting Arctic will be $2.5 trillion. The analysis projects likely damages in the tens of trillions by the end of the century.

This is yet another sobering warning of the high costs of unchecked climate change-costs that will be borne by homeowners, businesses, farmers, and cities and towns. It is also a reminder that half-measures on global warming will do little good. Without action to slow the warming soon, the Arctic air conditioner may well break down completely, and overwhelm any half-hearted attempts to turn down the heat on an overheating planet.

Sheila Watt-Cloutier, an Inuit leader and Nobel Peace Prize nominee said of our study: “This is more evidence of how all things connect. We know well how global warming is causing the sea ice and snow to melt, jeopardizing our way of life. Now, we can see how the melting Arctic is imposing similar costs on people across the planet.” Check out Reuters coverage of the study here.

]]>http://grist.org/climate-change/2011-02-08-costs-of-inaction-the-price-of-ice/feed/0nasa-ice-melt-463.jpgIce melt mapCosts of inaction: the economics of high-end warminghttp://grist.org/article/2011-02-02-costs-of-inaction-the-economics-of-high-end-warming/
http://grist.org/article/2011-02-02-costs-of-inaction-the-economics-of-high-end-warming/#commentsThu, 03 Feb 2011 06:13:21 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-02-02-costs-of-inaction-the-economics-of-high-end-warming/]]>Perhaps nowhere is the contrast between the science and economics of climate change as great as in the dueling metaphors governing the impact of high-end warming: “collapse” (following scientist Jared Diamond) vs. “reductions in the rate of growth” (following all standard integrated assessment models in economics, including those of Nicholas Stern and the IPCC).

By way of reference, mid-range estimates of business-as-usual warming are currently around 7.2 degrees F. During the last Ice Age, global temperatures were only 8.1 degrees F colder then they are today. Many climate scientists, I would argue, believe that high-end warming (greater than 7.2 degrees F) will likely impoverish much of humanity.

By contrast, economic models calmly integrate this warming of greater than Ice Age magnitude, only in the opposite direction, into scenarios assuming continued growth, albeit at reduced levels. Stern, for example, provided an integrated estimate of the costs of climate change, forecasting likely reductions in global output as high as 20 percent below the baseline. This is a big number, justifying immediate and large cuts in emissions on a benefit-cost basis.

And yet, even for Stern, that baseline assumes steady growth of 1.3 percent per capita, implying that by 2200, people on the planet will be 12 times as wealthy as they are today. My E3 colleague Frank Ackerman has noted that even assuming what Stern characterizes as an extreme worst case scenario — a 35 percent reduction in income below baseline — then the world would “only” be eight times richer in 2200. Similarly, the IPCC’s four “marker scenarios” all forecast developing country per capita GDP to equal that of industrial countries in 1990, beginning in 2050 (scenario A1B), to out beyond 2100 (scenario A2).

Chart: J. Bradford DeLongWhy no collapse? Most economists live with a powerful picture (U.S. version here) in their heads.

Calamities such as the Great Depression, major regional wars, global epidemics like AIDS, or the recent burst in the global housing bubble, barely put a dent in long-run growth. The default assumption is that capitalism will march relentlessly on, regardless of climate change (or peak oil, or fresh water, or top soil shortages). Sidestepping the issue of whether continued growth enhances welfare, the conventional economists’ position seems well-grounded in historical experience.

Against this record, ecological economists have developed a sophisticated neo-Malthusian response: that high population and growing affluence mean the future will not be like the past, and that the economics of a full planet make continued global economic growth untenable. As a book of cautionary tales, Diamond’s Collapse presents lesson after lesson of how resource constraints, married with an inadequate policy response, cascaded into political crisis and undermined the economic foundations of pre-industrial societies.

The climate debate between scientists and conventional economics is not about the likely physical effects of high-end warming. These impacts are incorporated into economic models. Rather, the differences emerge as economists focus on the costs of climate change that their models can measure.

At the macro level, Integrated Assessment Models develop damage functions very roughly calibrated from sectoral studies of moderate warming, that then reflect arbitrary increases in damages with greater warming. Elizabeth A. Stanton, Frank Ackerman, and Sivan Kartha (2009) point out that because William Norhdaus’s DICE model carries an exponent of two on its damage function, the model has to heat the planet up by 34 degrees F to cut global GDP in half! Increase the damage function exponent to four or five, and DICE makes collapse look somewhat more likely, but by no means inevitable.

Serious sectoral analysis of high-end warming impacts are few. One example is Robert J. Nicholls et al. (2008), who explore the case of a 16.4-feet, 100-year sea-level rise resulting from a hypothetical, rapid collapse of the Greenland and/or West Antarctic ice sheets. Some 400 million people currently live in land that would be potentially inundated. Actual inundation and relocation would depend on the degree of coastal protection initiated. The authors suggest that coastal protection of up to 50 percent would be justified on a benefit cost basis, reducing actual displacement to fewer than 15 million people over 100 years. Now this conclusion is hedged by several caveats, most prominently, that in some countries the costs of protection would rise prohibitively, to above 1 percent of GDP, and that Katrina (and add the BP blowout) show that optimal defensive investments are seldom made. Nevertheless, the paper has a startling bottom-line that is very, very far from collapse: a 16.4-feet, rapid sea level rise might imply displacement of only 150,000 people per year, on average. Nothing worse here then your average earthquake year.

To sum up: Economic models that model marginal changes have a hard time grappling with the economics of disaster. That said, academic economists nevertheless have waded in, and do tend to be aware of the limitations of their modeling exercises, providing appropriate caveats in the text. That said, those caveats often disappear from bottom line policy purposes to which studies are put. Thus the projections of continued future economic growth from the IPCC, and Stern.

In between collapse and slower growth, Martin Weitzman provides a useful metaphor for high-end warming: it will leave humanity inhabiting “a terra incognita biosphere.” In an unrecognizable bio-physical world, continued global economic growth is possible — it is hubris to categorically assert otherwise — but a Diamond-like catastrophic outcome would also seem to have uncomfortably high probabilities, especially for regional economies.

Do we require detailed quantitative macroeconomic estimates of the economic losses from collapse? Probably not. Weitzman has shown that for fat-tailed damage functions, the whole IAM modeling exercise breaks down.

Nevertheless, better sectoral analyses of the costs of high-end warming are needed. When climate scientists venture into policy, it is often with reference to the biblical hell and high-water that high-end warming will unleash: floods, droughts, famine, fire, plague, mass extinction. And yet compelling stories from economists about the relative costs of these future events are not yet well-developed. I’ll blog later on the ways in which dollar figures are important to frame the media debate, and public understanding about climate change.

]]>http://grist.org/article/2011-02-02-costs-of-inaction-the-economics-of-high-end-warming/feed/1sad_pug_400x266.jpgChart.New year, new idea for climate: the American Clean Energy partyhttp://grist.org/article/2011-01-03-new-year-new-idea-for-climate-the-american-clean-energy-party/
http://grist.org/article/2011-01-03-new-year-new-idea-for-climate-the-american-clean-energy-party/#respondTue, 04 Jan 2011 04:46:09 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-01-03-new-year-new-idea-for-climate-the-american-clean-energy-party/]]>Fossil fuel addiction is impoverishing the planet, and we have only a few short years to act before the window for action will close, forever.Photo: Mutasim BillahLast year was a bad year for the future of humans and other creatures of the Earth. The U.S. failed to act on climate, and the victory of dozens of Tea Party Republicans in November eliminated any prospect for serious action for at least the next three years.

This is tragic. Barring future technological or political miracles, we have now blown by the chance we had to stabilize the carbon blanket surrounding the planet at 450 parts per million (ppm) of CO2. Yet it is not “too late” for action. Ambitious politics this decade, culminating in carbon legislation in 2013 or ’15 or ’17, can still stabilize CO2 at 500 ppm.

And make no mistake: 500 ppm is worth fighting for, each and every day of our lives. Every tenth of a degree matters, and a planet with a carbon blanket that stabilizes at 500 ppm will preserve a dramatically more livable world than will a blanket of 650, 850, or 1000 ppm. Above all, 500 ppm will give our kids time and a fighting chance to figure out how to roll back concentrations to 450 ppm, and their kids back to 350.

So what’s the plan? How can we build a powerful clean energy majority in Washington, a stronger majority than the one that didn’t get the job done in 2010?

ACE: the American Clean Energy party

Only a mobilized public has the power to break through the deadly gridlock in Washington. Leading up to 2010, a number of groups tried to build this people power. Grassroots coalitions and organizations including 350.org, Energy Action, 1-Sky, The National Teach-in, and faith-based organizers worked to inspire and mobilize large numbers of Americans. Al Gore’s Alliance pursued media campaigns, signing up over 2 million people onto their listserv. The Green Groups pursued their own efforts to engage their memberships.

These initiatives, successful in staging one-day educational events, did build a wave of momentum. Coupled with the Environmental Defense Fund/U.S. Climate Action Partnership inside game, the movement crested in the summer of 2009, with the passage of the Waxman-Markey bill. However, the national grassroots effort ultimately had little real political traction. Since 2009, the collapsing economy and the rise of the Tea Party moved the debate backwards, with the Republican Party completely abandoning what had been a tentative openness to climate policy.

The national climate movement faced many challenges, but in large measure, it failed at mobilizing Americans behind clean energy politics because it didn’t do politics — it did education. By contrast, what can excite Americans and create sustained grassroots energy is participation in political campaigns. Obama demonstrated this in 2008, building an unprecedented grassroots tidal wave. Obama has since been criticized for squandering the people power he unleashed: Imagine if, in 2009, he had mobilized his army with a call for clean energy legislation?

A clean energy party can move beyond the Obama phenomenon, and broadly tap this grassroots energy. There are millions of Americans — so-called climate hawks — who understand the seriousness and depth of the climate crisis. Climate hawks want to work for political leaders with a commitment to changing the future. They want to do more than participate in C-3 educational campaigns, and email their congressperson. They are looking for a vehicle that can make a real difference. They are ready to give time and money to spreading the gospel of clean energy through participation in dozens of Congressional and Senate campaigns in 2012, 2014, and beyond.

How would ACE work? Simply. Run ACE-endorsed candidates in Democratic and Republican congressional and U.S. Senate primary elections. Most ACE races would be in swing districts — challenging especially dirty energy Democrats in primaries, but also creating space for a clean energy Republican voice.

ACE would be a “single focus” party, endorsing only candidates who pledged to run and govern as “moderate” D’s or R’s (as defined by their district or state) in all areas excepting one. For economic revitalization, jobs, national security, rural development, energy independence, clean air for our kids, climate stabilization, we need a revolution: clean energy!

Why moderate elsewhere? Because clean energy is the defining issue of our time. On all other issues there is time to debate, and room to compromise. But on energy, time has run out. Addiction to fossil fuels is strangling our economy, and impoverishing the planet, and we have only a few short years to act before the window for action will close, forever.

Single focus does not mean single issue. As the battle over Prop 23 showed last fall, clean energy is a winning political formula across the political spectrum, with an extraordinarily positive message and economic vision of the future. By running single focus candidates — otherwise pledging to govern as “moderates” for their state or district — we can prove the power of the clean energy message. We can force Democrats to become leaders, and Republicans to become, once again, open to clean energy policy.

What ACE stands for

The ACE platform would have three planks:

The American Permanent Fund: Every year, each American family receives a check for $1,000, and rising. The source? A fee on big polluters.

Clean energy leadership: Thirty billion a year to capture global leadership in the clean energy technologies that will rewire the world.

ACE would run a mix of “celebrities”, charismatic local candidates, and lots and lots of young people: why not Leo DiCaprio, Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Jessy Tolkan, Woody Harrelson, Hunter Lovins, Mike Tidwell, Heidi Cullen, Billy Parish, James Woolsey, Sally Bingham, Tom Friedman, Betsy Taylor, Richard Czizik, Tom “Smitty” Smith, Wahleah Johns, and student leaders in congressional districts across the country? Remember, you only have to be 25 years old to run for Congress. Movement leaders with flexibility in their day jobs would have time to move to a red or purple state or district to which they are connected, establish residency, and run.

The original model for ACE is the Progressive Party at the turn of the 20th century. The party was founded on a set of policy ideas — confronting the power of monopolies; consumer regulation; women’s suffrage. Running successful candidates as both Democrats and Republicans, Progressives forced the national debate in their direction. While the Progressives never controlled Washington, they achieved many of their policy goals.

Today of course, ACE’s evil-twin would be the Tea Party. The Tea Party depends on money from the Koch brothers and other large funders, but it has undeniably tapped real grassroots energy. In existence for just two years, and in (partial) opposition to the Republican Party establishment, the Tea Party successfully ran candidates in key Senate, House, and gubernatorial races across the country.

More significantly, the Tea Party phenomenon has completely changed the debate on climate — driving former Republican supporters of climate action either out of office (Mike Castle and Bob Inglis) or into retreat (John McCain and Lindsay Graham). Incredibly, of the 37 Republican Senate candidates this pa
st year, not one acknowledged the scientific fact of human-induced climate change. As has been the pattern since the 1970’s — from direct mail, to talk radio, to Fox News, to the Tea Party — the Right has been the innovator in American grassroots politics.

Climate hawks need to build their own political base, one powerful enough to demand that politicians pay attention to the physics of the planet. ACE, however, would be much more than a clean energy Tea Party. Above all, ACE has a practical, powerful, real-world platform for progress. The ACE we are holding is a relentlessly positive vision of economic revitalization and American energy independence.

No. ACE will run candidates only in primaries. There will be no effort to create a third party, and thus no spoilers.

Couldn’t ACE be taken over by left wing activists, becoming a marginalized umbrella party for progressive causes?

No. The central principle of ACE is that, outside of clean energy issues, candidates must run and govern as moderates. ACE would establish a party constitution with this principle that can only be changed with a super-majority. The part would elect a committee that vets candidates at the national level, and either allows or disallows them to run as ACE candidates.

What about right-wing media? Won’t ACE candidates be branded eco-socialists?

These days, any Democrat faces this kind of charge. The response is to stay the course and win at the grassroots. The Tea Partiers, when labeled right-wing crazies, have been very successful at this.

Where will the money come from?

ACE will never be funded like the Tea Party, by right-wing billionaires and fossil fuel corporations, but wouldn’t need to be. Once up and running, ACE will unleash a wave of grassroots energy, and would follow a grassroots membership-based funding model. Local candidates would raise their own money, while ACE leverages the national brand and pursues media effort to create interest in local candidates.

Fighting for the future

At the end of the day, ACE would be a winner because clean energy is powerful politics. Yet today, in our current political system, no one is making the case. Progressive Democrats don’t have to, and moderate Republicans are scared to. ACE can prove that if you tell the clean energy story, and you tell it well, you will win elections.

The symbol for ACE is the Ace of Hearts: not green or blue, but blood red. We have the solutions. We love our country.

I have talked to a dozen national climate leaders about ACE. Several think it has a potential as a game changer. If you’d like to join the conversation, sign up here. We will be having a national conference call to discuss ACE on Jan. 19 at noon Eastern. Details here. Please pass this opportunity along to anyone you know who would be interested.

Who knows? Maybe ACE will hold a founding convention in Chicago in the summer of 2011. Maybe we’ll see you and tens of thousands of Americans there.

The elections earlier this month saw the breaching of the 2016 deadline set by NASA’s Jim Hansen for global CO2 stabilization, and also moved us well beyond IPCC Chair Rajendra Pauchuari’s statement that action beyond 2012 “will be too late“. So where does this leave us? For what are we now, officially, too late?

Until this year, one could envision, just barely, a “politics-as-usual” scenario that set us on track to stabilizing C02 concentrations at 450 parts per million (ppm). The 450 goal would, according to the IPCC’s best guess, have held global temperatures to 2.1 degrees C (3.78 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels — a further 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) warming this century. Getting there would have required U.S. policy that initiated cuts in 2012, and delivered 80 percent reductions by 2050. These would have had to have been coupled with Chinese and Indian commitments to stabilize emissions by 2025, and then start down their own aggressive emission reduction pathways.

The 450 ppm goal could have been accommodated by (ambitious) politics-as-usual, because nothing radical, or particularly costly, was required. Instead, a gradual ratcheting down of fossil fuel consumption, coupled with policies to promote the rapid spread of efficiency and renewables, could have, more or less seamlessly, gotten us to 2050 and the 450 ppm goal. Up until this year, the challenge was neither technical nor economic, but rather political. And, at least in the U.S., we were almost there. Had Ted Kennedy not died, I think we would have had first-step climate legislation in place last April.

Now, with U.S. policy stalled for six to 10 years, 450 ppm is simply off the table under politics-as-usual. It is still within reach assuming extraordinary politics post 2020: a World War II style mobilization to rapidly rewire of the world with clean energy. It may still be achievable via the unforeseen development of truly cheap solar cells. But barring those two developments, toward what ambitious goal are we now realistically working?

The IPCC’s B1 scenario is still, just barely, on the politics-as-usual table. B1 has a CO2 equivalent of 600 ppm, implying CO2 concentrations of perhaps 550, and would lead to a 2100 temperature increase of, IPCC’s best guess, 2.3 degrees C (4.14 degrees F) above pre-industrial, or a further 1.7 degrees C (3 degrees F) this century. In contrast to the 450 scenario, B1 allows global emission increases by 2050 to 40 percent above 1990 levels, giving us a little wiggle room. But just a little. While European emissions have stabilized around 1990 levels, the U.S. has already eaten up close to half of that space.

At first blush, B1 doesn’t seem so bad: only a .2 degree C (.36 degree F) temperature increase over this century from the 450 ppm target. But unlike the case of 450 stabilization, global temperatures would keep rising significantly beyond 2100, unless our grandkids can figure out a way to dial back the CO2 concentrations, to 450, 400, or even 350. And of course, every tenth of a degree matters, because of the possibility that we may cross some biophysical tipping point — methane releases from thawing permafrost, fire-driven deforestation — that would cause even further warming.

At second blush, following November’s elections, something like B1 is now the best we will do under ambitious politics-as-usual. Folks dedicated to stopping global warming — so-called climate hawks — need to understand that, short of climate-disaster-driven politics, or unforeseen economic break-throughs, the likely best-case-scenario is that the road to 350 will go through 550.

That said, B1 won’t happen without extraordinary dedication to the current political process, and the rebuilding of a powerful, inclusive clean-energy movement over the next two years, and the next decade. Pre-recession, global emissions growth exceeded the IPCC’s high end scenario, A1F1, a nightmarish 1550 C02 equivalent scenario by 2100. So while our current political system could deliver B1 as an alternative, it simply will not, without the kind of widespread political engagement that goes beyond what we saw with the Obama phenomenon in 2007-2008: sustained, focused on clean energy, and occurring in a less disastrous economic environment.

How does this “climate-realist” road go?

For the next 6-10 years, the Clean Air Act, California’s policies, RGGI, and other laws can be used to hold U.S. emissions steady, and maybe even cut them 5-15 percent. This means fight like hell to keep the policies strong. In 2012, the presidency, not Congress, will be the key, in determining the speed at which the EPA moves forwards.

In the meantime, rebuild a grassroots political movement demanding clean energy. Support all efforts at the state and local level, and work all levers to drive investment into clean energy.

By 2016 or 18, or even 20, rebuild super-majority congressional support for clean energy, and pass comprehensive carbon legislation. The timing will depend on the degree to which climate disasters unfold.

So we stabilize as low as we can, and then leave it to our kids and theirs to then drive levels back to 450, and within a century or two, back to 350. Hope and pray that all our combined work catalyzes some cheap clean technology, that solves the problem in ways we can’t imagine, and sooner than we ever thought possible. And hope and pray also that we don’t cross tipping points along the way, triggering runway warming in the process.

For those of us who have been, for many years, working toward a 450 or even 350 goal for this century, the elections this month have created a harsh new reality, a profoundly depressing reality. Yet we all still know that keeping the CO2 blanket as thin as we possibly can will preserve a dramatically more livable world, and will protect many more of the beautiful creatures of this earth, than will a blanket of 650, or 850 or 1000 ppm.

In our lifetimes, it will never be too late to fight global warming. Every degree will matter. Over the coming years and decades, there will be no better fight, no victory that will more enrich the lives of countless human generations to follow, than to stabilize the climate.

Proponents of Proposition 23 in California claim no. They claim that California should suspend its landmark climate and energy policy (AB 32) until its unemployment rate drops to 5.5 percent. Setting aside scientists’ warnings that we’re running out of time to address climate change, and setting aside the fact that the oil company funders of Proposition 23 also opposed AB 32 when it was passed in 2006, when California’s unemployment rate was lower than 5.5 percent, is there anything to be said for waiting until the employment picture looks less bleak?

Based on what economists have established about the relationship between climate policy and jobs, the answer is a resounding NO. There is surprising consensus among economists around the world (excepting those who work for right wing think tanks) on two main points:

1. Addressing climate change can lead to net job growth in the United States

With the U.S. likely facing high unemployment in coming years, green investments will create more jobs then other types of investment.

Reduced oil imports would create jobs. Reducing oil imports can save hundreds of billions of dollars each year on imported oil. Rather than send this money abroad, it can be spent at home, creating jobs. A quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation [PDF] suggests that we have the potential to create 900,000 new jobs in the U.S. for every $100 billion decrease in oil imports.

Carbon solutions invest in labor intensive domestic jobs and domestic resources. The solutions to climate change-ranging from renewable energy, to high-speed rail, to smart-grid investments, to sustainable biofuels-depend more on domestic resources, and also use more labor per dollar invested, than do fossil fuel alternatives. One recent study suggested that a switch towards carbon-reducing investment could create 1.7 million near term jobs.

The United States can create jobs by re-assuming technology leadership. China is moving aggressively to capture leadership in solar, wind, high-speed rail, and other key clean energy solutions. But as recently as 1995, the U.S. was the technology leader in wind and ‘baseload solar’ — solar thermal. U.S. utilities today are purchasing these technologies from China, Denmark, and Spain. By reassuming technology leadership, and adopting a policy framework to support clean, homegrown energy industries, the U.S. can create new jobs by selling into an emerging, massive global market. Portugal’s recent success creating jobs by growing its own renewable energy industry demonstrates the tremendous possibilities.

Investment in clean energy can mobilize capital to end the recession. The current downturn, resulting from the collapse of an asset bubble, is the hardest type from which to recover. In these types of recessions, self-corrective mechanisms are weak. Concerned about lack of future demand, businesses scale back investment, which has a multiplier effect, holding back recovery. A sustained national effort to rewire the country with clean energy, including a cap and trade system as a central driver, could mobilize large-scale private sector investment and initiate a positive feedback process whereby investment leads to jobs, which create higher income and demand, thereby generating greater investment, job creation, and economic growth over time. The case that carbon legislation can help end the recession was made recently by Economics Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman.

2. Addressing climate change will not result in significant job loss

In spite of heated rhetoric claiming that past episodes of environmental regulation have been ‘job-killers,’ numerous independent studies show:

Plant closings and layoffs as a result of environmental regulation are very rare. Repeated studies show that layoffs attributable to environmental regulations account for only 1/10th of 1 percent of all layoffs nationwide: around 1,000-3,000 jobs per year across the entire United States. For example, less than 7000 jobs were lost between 1990-1997 as a direct result of the Clean Air Act Amendments taking effect. Over that same period, 10 million U.S. workers were laid off for non-environmental reasons.

Proposed climate legislation will not be costly and will have little overall negative impact on employment through 2030. In sharp contrast to the “sky-will-fall” claims of industry trade groups, independent academic and government studies of U.S. climate legislation, from MIT; Harvard’s Dale Jorgensen; the Energy Information Administration; The Research Triangle Institute; and the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Lab, see very low short-term costs and negligible impacts [PDF] on long-run job growth.

Environmental spending creates jobs that offset losses. Compared to overall spending in the economy, on a per dollar basis, spending on environmental protection and clean-up employs twice as many workers in construction (11 versus 4 percent) and 25 percent more in manufacturing (20 versus 16 percent). A study [PDF] by Resources For the Future’s Morgenstern of the heavily regulated steel, petroleum, plastics, and pulp and paper industries concluded: “While environmental spending clearly has consequences for business and labor, the hypothesis that such spending significantly reduces employment in heavily polluting industries is not supported by the data.”

Few firms flee the United States to “pollution havens” in poor countries. Environmental costs are generally below 2 percent [PDF] of total business costs. Firms that do leave the U.S. generally do so in pursuit of lower labor and health costs, expenditures forming a much higher percentage of their total costs. Economists searching for evidence [PDF] supporting widespread flight of polluting industries have not found significant effects. In the climate-change case, the handful of energy intensive industries that might be subject to competitive pressure from abroad can be shielded with World Trade Organization-sanctioned import tariffs.

Climate action will heavily impact one group of workers: coal miners. With or without greenhouse gas controls, coal industry employment is predicted to fall significantly by 2025 as a result of mechanization. If carbon emissions are restricted, we are likely to see a further decline of jobs of about 1,500 per year. The nation has a clear obligation to invest heavily in adjustment assistance to help miners who lose from climate stabilization efforts.

Prop 23 is allegedly about saving jobs. But several decades of economic research have kicked the props out from under that argument. The facts are that climate investments will create green jobs, and lead to very small job losses in affect
ed industries.

]]>http://grist.org/article/2010-09-17-climate-and-jobs/feed/0california_180.jpgThe economics of 350http://grist.org/article/the-economics-of-350/
http://grist.org/article/the-economics-of-350/#respondWed, 07 Oct 2009 02:02:42 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/the-economics-of-350/]]>There is good news on the climate policy front. The Europeans have ratcheted down their emission targets; the Chinese are getting serious about solar power and energy efficiency; and Washington, after opening a multi-billion dollar stimulus spicket for clean energy, is lumbering towards a carbon cap.

This is progress-inadequate, but still important progress — towards what many of us used to think we had to do: cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. These cuts would stabilize the thickness of the heat-trapping carbon dioxide blanket surrounding the earth at 450 ppm (parts per million) and, we thought, provide insurance that the global average temperature increase would not exceed 2 degrees Celsius from 1990 levels.

But 450ppm, it turns out, is so 2005.

In the last 4 years, climate scientists, lead by NASA’s James Hansen, have dramatically altered the bar. To avoid global warming catastrophe-collapse of the continental ice-sheets and sea level rise of dozens of feet — many scientists are now telling us we have to get down to 350 ppm, and quickly.

And so, what four years ago was a heroic target of 450 ppm has suddenly become a mind-boggling target of 350 ppm. Instead of global emissions cuts of 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050, 350 requires 97 percent reductions: a complete conversion to renewable energy systems by mid-century, with the world economy virtually free of carbon emissions. This is a far more demanding goal than any of the leading policy proposals under discussion today.

Game over?

No. Just time to adjust our thinking about what is possible.

We, along with four other authors, recently completed a report [PDF] for Economics for Equity and the Environment Network (E3), surveying the economic studies informed by recent science. The report found that quicker action aimed at more ambitious targets makes good economic sense. The report outlines what it will take to achieve 350 and finds that a comprehensive global strategy is still well-within the range of what most reasonable people are willing to pay today to avoid far greater damages from climate change down the road. With likely investments of about 1-3 percent of global GDP, we could rewire the planet with clean energy, rebuild global forests to trap billions of tons of carbon, create jobs, and stabilize the climate. And depending on factors such as the price of oil, these investments might actually save us money.

The bad news on the climate front is NOT that the costs of preventing climate change are becoming too expensive. Estimates of the costs have remained relatively stable, while estimates of the likely costs of inaction are becoming unbearable. Whether the final number is 450 or 350, we face no insoluble technical or economic challenges. This is still a problem we can afford to solve. Stopping global warming remains fundamentally a problem of political will.

Why 350?

At the Rio Earth Summit in 1990, the international community agreed to work to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with the global climate. This statement solidified into a goal of holding further warming to no more than 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above 1990 levels; operationally, this suggested that we needed to stabilize CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere at below 450 ppm.

So for the past few years, 450 has been the number. And it is a daunting one: at current rates of emissions, we will blow past 450 ppm in less than 30 years. Stabilizing at 450 ppm requires rich countries to immediately cap carbon and begin steep cuts. By 2025, the 450 ppm goal means that emissions have to be falling across the entire planet. Yet now, in 2009, governments and businesses are just beginning to come to grips with 450. In the developed world, the architecture for a multi-decadal cap-and-cut system is emerging, and in China there is a growing commitment to clean energy technology, and an inching towards the acceptance of carbon cuts.

But now the scientists have stepped back in.

Even if we achieve 450 ppm CO2, according to the Stern Review, we still face a 70 percent chance that the globe will heat up more than 2.4 degrees C. The last time the earth was that hot sea levels were 75 feet higher.

On top of this, increasing evidence suggests that the earth’s climate system is much more sensitive to the build-up of C02 than conventional wisdom would have it. Initial warming appears more and more likely to trigger processes that will lead to additional warming: methane released from thawing tundra and drying arctic wetlands; carbon emitted from burning forests and drying soils.

Given this new evidence, Hansen and others have argued that to avoid triggering the collapse of the ice-sheets, and eventual flooding of the great coastal cities of the world, we have to hold warming to less than 2 degrees C.

And so, in the year 2007, the new number arrived: 350.

Is 350 Possible?

Hansen (Figure 1) described a detailed scenario for reducing greenhouse gas emissions with the goal of reaching 350 ppm CO2 by 2100. It included phasing out coal completely (or achieving 100% carbon capture) by 2030, along with a combination of large-scale reforestation, avoided deforestation and carbon capture and storage to withdraw huge quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere. To reach the 350 target by 2100, the world would have to quickly go beyond reductions to achieve net negative emissions-removing more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than are emitted each year.

Our report for the E3 Network contrasts Hansen’s scenario with a less demanding but still quite ambitious trajectory which does not require the world to achieve negative net emissions. In this scenario, the world reaches 350 ppm CO2 by 2200. Emissions are reduced to 54 percent of 1990 emissions by 2020 and 3 percent by 2050, and then zero out, but do not go negative.

The bottom-line on the technical side: Decarbonizing by 2050 is possible with, roughly, the suite of technologies now available or on the near-term horizon. Very aggressive policy, however, will still be required very soon to drive down the costs of renewables, to redesign cities, reimagine transport and agricultural systems, and insure that all efficiencies are captured. Doing all this gets the world to 350 by 2200. Taking the additional steps to achieve negative emissions (and 350 by 2100) would require the development of large-scale, cost-effective sequestration technologies that go well beyond reforestation.

What will it cost to get to 350? Business lobbies have argued that even the moderate reductions called for in recent U.S. legislation would cripple the economy. In fact, there is a large body of research projecting that recent U.S. legislative proposals would have very little economic impact, and that the much more ambitious emission reductions required to reach 450 and 350 ppm respectively, will have moderate net costs.

At least four research groups have modeled global scenarios that lead to 350 ppm CO2. One finds that in a world with unemployed labor and other resources, the stimulus from new climate investments might accelerate economic growth. The other three groups find net annual costs that are generally between 1 percent and 3 percent of world output. These studies are consistent with the Stern Review, the reports by McKinsey, and others, suggesting that achieving 450 ppm would cost around 1 percent or less of global GDP.

Both of these targets, 350 or 450, become a lot cheaper if oil prices return soon to $150 a barrel. If peak oil drives prices that high in the coming decade, then decarbonizing at a pace to hit 350 could lead to economic gains.

At first glance, 1-3 percent of global output may seem too high a price to pay, but if examined in its proper context, the initial sticker shock fades. Suppose, for instance, that the cost of climate protection turns out to be 2.5 percent of global GDP. In an economy like the U.S. that is growing at 2.5 percent per year, spending 2.5 percent of GDP on climate protection each year would be equivalent to skipping one year’s growth, and then resuming. Put another way, if climate policy is at the high end in terms of cost, Americans in 2050 would have to wait one additional year, until 2051, to be as rich as they otherwise would have been had they not been steadily investing in the transition to clean energy.

Or consider another comparison. Military spending is greater than 4 percent of GDP in both the United States and China. On the strength of a different narrative about potential future dangers, both countries are already diverting from annual consumption, year after year, more than the high end estimates of what it would take to stop global warming.

350 and the Bottom Line

Dropping the global climate target from 450 ppm to 350 ppm of atmospheric CO2 may appear to present an impossible task. In fact, it leaves us with qualitatively the same challenge. Achieving 350 simply requires accelerating a global technology revolution that will yield many benefits — in terms of climate stability, energy security, and economic payback. And estimates of the scale of the investment needed to complete that revolution — and complete it on time — are affordable.

Our report for E3 Network is notable for what it didn’t find. There are no reasonable studies that say that a 350 ppm stabilization target will destroy the economy; there are no studies that claim that it is desirable to wait before taking action on climate protection. On the contrary, there is strong, widespread endorsement for policies to promote energy conservation, development of new energy technologies, and price incentives and policies that will redirect the world economy onto a low-carbon path to sustainability.

The constraints on allowable CO2 emissions, for stabilization at a level as low as 350 ppm, are painfully tight. A realistic policy scenario, therefore, demands not only maximum progress in pursuing energy efficiency and promoting renewable energy, but also for measures that remove carbon from the atmosphere. Many of the technologies that will be needed for large-scale sequestration do not yet exist in mass-produced, commercially available forms, if at all.

What are the limits to what we can achieve through energy efficiency, solar power, carbon capture and storage, and other new technologies? This is a question about an unknowable future: a century ago, just before the outbreak of World War I, who could have anticipated mobile phones, laptop computers, and the internet? It is, however, clear that the pace of the clean energy revolution will determine whether we hit a concentration target of 350, 450, or fail to do so. It is also clear that failure to stop global warming will impose very high costs on our children and grandchildren. The world is taking important initial steps toward addressing the climate crisis, with increasingly widespread acceptance of the need to avoid 2 degrees C of warming, and a carbon target of 450 ppm. It now appears that avoiding dangerous climate change will require us to do better than that. The best available estimates suggest that we can, indeed, afford the economics of 350. What we cannot afford is too little climate policy, too late.